The Department Of Defense's New #1 Enemy Is Named 'Freckleface Strawberry'
The DoD is concerned that Julianne Moore's children's book might teach kids that it's okay to be different.
While Elon Musk and JD Vance spent last week in Germany, telling Germans that they really need to just get over the whole Hitler thing, embrace AfD, their far-right party, and end their laws governing hate speech and Holocaust denial, MAGA loyalists at home have been hard at work finding things they’d much prefer censoring — like children’s books!
Last week, the Department of Defense announced that children studying in Pentagon schools serving US military families would not be able to access the library for a week in order to allow the government to root out any books that might teach children about tolerance, diversity, gender and racial equality and inclusivity, because they don’t like any of that. It also goes without saying that they will also be banning any book mentioning the existence of transgender people, because if you never tell kids transgender people exist, transgender people will stop existing. That’s just how things work!
The DoD then sent out a memo to parents alerting them that a number of these books had been identified and selected for review, in order to ensure that they don’t teach kids anything about how to be nice people who mind their own business. One of the potentially dangerous books they found? Freckleface Strawberry, written by Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore (who, as it happens, actually attended one of these schools).
“It is a great shock for me to learn that my first book, Freckleface Strawberry, has been banned by the Trump Administration from schools run by the Department of Defense,” Moore wrote on Instagram after being notified of this. “Freckleface Strawberry is a semi-autobiographical story about a seven-year-old girl who dislikes her freckles but eventually learns to live with them when she realizes that she is different ‘just like everybody else.’ It is a book I wrote for my children and for other kids to remind them that we all struggle, but are united by our humanity and our community.”
That, we can assume, is the big issue the Trump administration has with the book — that lessons like “because after all, the things that make you different also make you YOU” are just a touch too close to “diversity is our strength” for comfort for them. If kids learn to be accepting of freckles, what’s next? Being okay with people of different races, religious beliefs (or nonbelief), genders, body sizes and sexual orientations?
“The single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at an employee town hall at the Pentagon on Friday. “It served a purpose of dividing the force.”
Yes, because what we really want in the military are a bunch of bigots who are either enraged or terrified (usually both) by the idea of being around people who are different from them. Surely that will bring everyone together. Perhaps we can go even further and go back to the good old days of segregated military units, just so guys like Pete Hegseth can feel more comfortable. After all, how is he supposed to be a big tough military guy if he’s standing on a table screaming “Eek! A woman!?”
This is how we know, by the way, that it was never that the Right gave a damn about “free speech” or “cancel culture,” but that they just really wanted it to be socially acceptable to be shitty human beings. They’re perfectly thrilled to censor or try to “cancel” anything that does not further their goal of getting to live in a weirdly homogenous society in which everyone else is just as hideously boring as they are.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Hegseth is probably still steamed that his identification as "Alcoholic-American" wasn't considered an actual DEI affinity group.
Remember whenever Dr Seuss’s estate discontinued one of their old obscure outdated books with racists depictions and the right wing echo chamber lost its shit?
They hooped and hollared about “free speech” and “cancel culture” destroying 1st Amendment rights?
Yeah, now they’re full blown book burners using the full weight of the government to do it.